In 1941 the Italians were the largest foreign unit on all the Eastern Front. Sixty thousand of them had come, divided into three divisions and into numerous detachments of specialists. One saw them everywhere, from the Ditieper to the Donets, small, swarthy, funny-looking in their two-pointed forage caps, or looking like birds of paradise under their bersagliere helmets from which projected, amidst the gusts of the steppe, a stately crop of rooster and pheasant feathers!

The Italians' rifles looked like toys. They used them with great skill to kill all the chickens in the region.

We had made their acquaintance as soon as we arrived in Dniepropetrovsk. We soon formed a very high opinion of their spirit of initiative and of their craftiness. They had gathered round an enormous cask which sat, unguarded, on a railway car. It was brimful with Chianti wine. In the side of this mighty tun the Italians had drilled a tiny hole from which the wine gushed through a hollow straw.

The invention proved quite a success with our topers, who went back time and time again to that wondrous fount, worthy of the Burgundian weddings of Charles the Bold or of Philip the Good! The Italians, sure of their supply-it was a 2,000-liter cask-amicably traded places with us. From that moment on, the Walloon volunteers were extremely enamoured with Italy and were delighted with the collaboration it provided on the Eastern Front!

The front was not a single, continuous line, but a series of strong points. Our posts in Cherbinovka had only snow to their left and right. To reach the closest Italians, whose sector extended to the south toward Stalino, we had to march for two hours across the steppe.

We used to go to chat with them during lulls in the fighting. Obviously, their lemons and their Chianti were of some importance. But their charm also drew us.

The complication was that they detested the Germans. The latter, in turn, couldn't abide the Italians' light fingers or their ardent armours in the ruined isbas. Neither could they tolerate the Italians' whimsical demeanor and quaint Latin carefreeness, so full of irreverence, indolence, persiflage, and natural grace, so different from Prussian stiffness.

By contrast, the Italians bridled whenever they saw a German snap to attention or cry out orders. That didn't fit in with having their hands in their pockets, wearing their russet plumes, and performing their merry escapades.

Their brand of nationalism was also different. The Italians loved Mussolini and over and over cried out "Du-cel Du-cel Du-ce!" until they were hoarse. Such outburts were only of a sentimental kind, however.Mussolini's dreams of imperial grandeur did not reach them. They were as proud as

peacocks, but without ambition.One day,when they insisted on their desire to have peace again at any cost.

"But if you do not struggle to the very end, you are going to lose your colonies!"

"Bah!," they answered, "what good is it to kill yourself for some colonies? We are happy at home. We don't need anything. We have the sun. We have our fruits. We have love . . ."

As a philosophy it had its counterparts. Horace had said the same thing, but less frankly.

Likewise, they found it absolutely useless to work too hard. Our idea of human labor left them bored. Why work so much? And again they would take up their soft, alluring, sing-song litany: the sun, the fruits, love ...

"After all," I continued, "work is a joy! Don't you other nations love to work?"

Then an Italian from the South, with princely grace, offered me this reply magnificent in its artlessness and its solemnity..

"But sir, what good is work?"

"What good is it?", When Germans heard such answers they choked for a week

and very nearly had attacks of apoplexy.

For the Italians, to their misfortune, the day and night watches provided some 'good," as did the thankless duty in the snow and ice.

Often their gregarious sentries left their posts to bask in the warmth of an isba where they chattered, jested, mooched, and studied very closely the attributes of the local beauties.

The Russians finally took their measure with a low blow. Our pleasant comrades from across the Alps paid dearly for their Latin nonchalance.

One night, in the southern part of the sector, strong detachments of Cossacks glided on their high-strung horses across the deep snow. At dawn, they were easily able to encircle three villages occupied by the Italians, but unprotected by the guards, who were busy sleeping or making love. They were taken completely by surprise.

The Soviets particularly detested the Italians. They hated them even more than they did the Germans, and on the Eastern Front they always treated them with an extraordinary cruelty. In the twinkling of an eye they seized the three villages. No one had the time to react. The Italians were then dragged to the coal pits, where they were completely stripped of their

clothes. Then the torture began. The Cossacks brought large buckets of icy water. Roaring with laughter, they emptied thern on the bodies of their victims in cold which hovered 30 to 35 degrees below zero centigrade. The poor wretches in the three villages all died, frozen alive.

No one escaped, not even the doctors. Not even the chaplain, who, stripped like a Roman marble, also suffered the torture of water and ice. Two days later, the three villages were recaptured. Naked bodies lay everywhere in the snow, twisted, contorted, as if they had died in a fire.

From that time on, the Italian troops of the Donets were reinforced by German armor. All along their lines heavy German tanks, painted entirely white, engines throbbing, lurked in the deep snow.

That was a necessity.

The Reds became more and more active. To our left, to our right, they struck violently. Day and night, the steppe shook with gunfire. Soviet airplanes appeared. Their bombs dug large gray craters around us.

The cold became ever more penetrating. In mid-January, the temperature dropped to 38 degrees below zero.

Our little horses' snouts were all white with ice. From their nostrils, wet with blood, spattered, drop after drop, on the trail, hundreds of spots, like pink carnations.